| ▲ | LorenDB 4 hours ago |
| I live in rural America. The story is quite similar here. My options were (a) cellular hotspot, which is slow and expensive, or (b) satellite internet, which is also slow and expensive. Despite government programs, there are no cable/fiber/DSL options in my area. Starlink fills the gap nicely; it's not blazingly fast, but pretty much meets FCC broadband definitions for $55/mo. |
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| ▲ | jcims 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It’s also surprisingly reliable given the physics of it all. I built a house out in the country in 2007 and 10Mbps DSL was all that was available for terrestrial connectivity up until literally yesterday. The DSL would go down for hours a couple of times per month. I got on an early starlink pilot program and had a dish up in early 2021. Aside from momentary blips on the leading edge of a stormfront and occasional network issues a couple of times per year, it’s been rock solid with half the latency and 20x the bandwidth. |
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| ▲ | fluoridation 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't understand. Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. Why are there no wired connections available? Do the connections not reach the famous last mile? |
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| ▲ | acchow 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | There are only 170 ground stations (about 100 in the US). So for someone living in rural america, it's really "famous last 300 miles". | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That can't be right. The satellites can only cover a diameter of 15 miles. Anyone living any further from a ground station is still SOL. |
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| ▲ | consensus1 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. The last mile problem is legitimately so difficult in rural areas that it is more cost effective to launch a constellation of 10,000+ satellites than it is to run the wires. | | |
| ▲ | SOLAR_FIELDS 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you happen to live within line of site of a cell tower buying a MIMO antenna and beaming internet off of a data plan is also somewhat viable, but Starlink is probably better on bandwidth and packet loss | | |
| ▲ | fluoridation 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I wonder about the economics, though. Intuitively it doesn't seem like it can be more efficient to launch constellations of satellites than run kilometers of cables, even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? So around two orders of magnitude cheaper than a satellite? Something isn't adding up for me. | | |
| ▲ | Panzer04 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Starling is 10k satellites shared across the entire planet. A satellite will serve thousands of customers, whereas a fixed line only serves one. I think 10k is also severely understating the cost per customer. There's like hundreds of metres between these houses at a minimum, and in some areas possibly Kilometers from house to house. |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I live in a rural neighborhood with fiber. Multiple neighbors go with Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough. |
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| ▲ | colechristensen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My parents in rural America had a local ISP that did long distance wireless (highly directional antenna mounted on the house pointed at the top of the grain elevator a few miles away) but it was an unreliable 20 Mbps because the ISP wasn't interested in upgrading their equipment. |
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| ▲ | theoreticalmal 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This could have been a revolutionary way of accessing the internet before Starlink. Grain elevators are everywhere in the US Midwest. Can’t believe it wasn’t capitalized on | | |
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| ▲ | sejje 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Same, except I had DSL--the local provider 'guarantees' speeds of 10Mbps to my house. So, needless to say, starlink has been amazing. |
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| ▲ | whycombinetor 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Starlink is also satellite internet, right? |
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| ▲ | sph 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Starlink satellites are ~500 km in altitude. Regular satellite internet is in geostationary orbit at ~35,000 km in altitude. The difference in latency is massive. 3ms vs 220ms roundtrip time at the speed of light. | |
| ▲ | cwillu 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, but the low altitude of the satellites makes a big difference. |
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| ▲ | gonzalohm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Is it really $55 a month? |
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